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After returning from talks with Iranian counterparts in Islamabad, Vice President JD Vance said this week that the Trump administration is offering Tehran a “grand bargain”: “If you guys commit to not having a nuclear weapon, we are going to make Iran economically thrive.”

If this were actually Trump’s offer, there would be nothing left to discuss. In the 2015 JCPOA, and multiple occasions since, the Iranian government has reaffirmed that it will never “seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.” Trump’s response was to shred the pact and impose “maximum pressure” sanctions designed to crush Iran’s economy. This economic warfare, continued by the Biden team in the interregnum, culminated in the current round of US-Israeli aggression that has killed thousands, left hundreds of billions of dollars in damages, pushed millions of Iranians into poverty, and also caused widespread carnage in Lebanon.

Vance gave a more honest summation of the US position a few days earlier when he ended the talks in Pakistan: “We just could not get to a situation where the Iranians were willing to accept our terms.” Indeed, the Iranians held the US to Trump’s stated position for accepting the ceasefire, when he called Iran’s 10-point plan “a workable basis on which to negotiate.” Instead, his designated envoy Vance – flanked by serial diplomacy saboteurs Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff – simply reformulated the same terms for capitulation. Among them, that Iran abandons both peaceful nuclear enrichment and its support for regional groups that resist US-Israeli dominance.

For a Tehran government that has so far staved off, at great cost, a US-Israeli military campaign to impose those goals via regime change and Trump’s genocidal threats of ending Iranian civilization, these are non-starters. “The main problem here is that the Americans very mistakenly have been thinking that they have won the war,” a senior Iranian official told me. “So they are going to dictate their will at the negotiation table instead of a deal, which is normally based on a give and take.” If the US insists on extracting a surrender from Iran which “they couldn’t during the war, it is not going to happen.”

The Trump administration was forced to enter negotiations after Iran struck US military assets in the region and hindered the global economy by limiting naval passage in the Strait of Hormuz. According to Vance, Iran’s response amounts to “economic terrorism.” In reality, Iran is using its leverage over the Strait to end a campaign of US-Israeli terror, all while charging tolls to fund reconstruction.

Trump has responded with a naval blockade of his own, deploying US warships to intercept vessels that enter or exit Iranian ports. But Iran is not completely boxed in. It will try to evade the US siege through land-based shipping routes, all while Trump faces mounting global pressure over his disruption to global supply chains and energy markets. Iran has also threatened to counter Trump by expanding its blockade of the Strait to the Persian Gulf, the Sea of Oman, and the Red Sea.

Media accounts of the ongoing negotiations are focused on the issue of uranium enrichment, with both sides offering timelines for the duration of a potential curb on Iran’s nuclear program. Yet as Vance’s disingenuous “grand bargain” underscores, uranium enrichment is ultimately not the issue. At the last round of talks in Geneva, Iran addressed the White House’s professed concerns, ruling out any stockpiling of uranium and thereby closing off any potential path to a bomb.

Iranian flexibility was newly confirmed in the New York Times’ insider account of how Trump went to war. After meeting their Iranian counterparts in Geneva, Kushner and Witkoff reported to the president that they “could probably negotiate something, but it would take months,” and maybe even “a lot” of effort. A months-long timeline would be a lost faster than the JCPOA, which took nearly two years to finalize before Trump tore it up. Because Trump, yet again, had no patience for diplomacy, he launched a war of aggression instead.

The chief obstacle to a grand bargain is Washington’s unfettered support to the main source of all instability in West Asia: Israeli aggression. Just as the ceasefire came into effect last week, Israel launched a new wave of violence in Lebanon that has killed hundreds of civilians, destroyed thousands of homes, and forced over 1.2 million to flee. Israel was aiming to provoke a response from Iran in defense of its ally Hezbollah, thereby undermining the ceasefire and cajoling Trump to resume the regime change war that Benjamin Netanyahu lobbied him to undertake. Iran instead insisted on respecting Lebanon’s inclusion in the ceasefire, which has helped compel Trump to announce a 10-day ceasefire in Lebanon earlier today.

Trump says he plans to host additional talks between the Israeli and Lebanese governments. The US will try to compel the pliant Lebanese president Joseph Aoun to reject any linkage with Iran, which could free up Israel to continue terrorizing the Lebanese people and trying to wipe out Hezbollah. While there is indeed a major split inside Lebanon over Hezbollah’s militant activities, a vast majority opposes any normalization with Israel, whose leadership openly fantasizes about expanding “Greater Israel” up to the Litani River. Hezbollah is the only force inside Lebanon that can repel Israel’s colonial designs.

Because the Trump administration won’t constrain Israeli expansionism, it won’t acknowledge that the Iranians have long offered a grand bargain to resolve all of these flashpoints. As far back as 2003, the Iranian government floated a sweeping agreement with the US to limit its nuclear program, cooperate against “terrorism”, end “material support” to Palestinian militant groups, and help convert Hezbollah into a strictly “political organization” inside Lebanon. In exchange, Iran wanted respect for its sovereignty, an end to all sanctions, and US-Israeli acceptance of the Saudi peace initiative, which would grant Palestinians a state within the 1967 borders.

According to then-senior State Department official and longtime Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, the Bush administration shunned the Iranian proposal because “the bias was toward a policy of regime change.” Subsequent administrations have ignored similar overtures. This includes a December 2017 declaration from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, endorsed by Iran and Hamas, calling for a “two-state solution with East Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Palestine” alongside a just resolution for Palestinian refugees.

Rather than accept the latter, which happens to reflect the consensus of virtually every other state on earth, US-Israeli leaders maintain a status quo of occupation, ethnic cleansing, land theft, and regime change. Because Iran anchors a regional grouping that resists this agenda, the grand bargain that it offered the US more than two decades ago remains a non-starter in Washington. Under this posture, Trump will be limited to walking away and leaving Iranians to rebuild, under crippling sanctions, from the latest wreckage that the president and his Israeli partner have gleefully caused.

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In a national address on the Iran war Wednesday night, President Trump offered no exit plan beyond claiming that US “military objectives”, which have changed as much as his conflicting rationales for starting the conflict, will be achieved “very shortly.” The main objective, he made clear, is to escalate joint US-Israeli bombings of Iran’s civilian infrastructure. “Over the next two to three weeks,” Trump said, “we are going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”

True to his word -- and to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s earlier promise of “death and destruction from the sky, all day long,” – the US and Israel followed up with a new round of war crimes. The latest US-Israeli strikes include an under-construction bridge linking Tehran to the western city of Karaj, built to ease traffic for millions; residential buildings; steel factories; pharmaceutical plants; universities; and the storied Pasteur Institute, a century-old center for health research.

After claiming two days earlier that he had made “great progress” in talks with the Iranian leadership, Trump made no mention of it, presumably because such progress, and the talks themselves, are another presidential fiction. He instead reiterated that the bombing spree is aimed at forcing Iran to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Unless Iran relents, he said, the US will destroy “each and every one of their electric generating plants,” which will be hit “very hard.” Welcoming Trump’s threat, Sen. Lindsey Graham summarized it as follows: “You either do a deal where you get out of the business you’re in, or we’re going to blow your stuff up — the things that will allow you to function as a nation. That is your choice.”

By Iran’s impermissible “business”, Graham means possessing the capacity to defend itself and supporting regional allies like Hezbollah and Yemen’s Ansar Allah. This alliance, the Wall Street Journal recently noted in a rare acknowledgment of the war’s actual aims, “serve[s] as the main challenge to U.S. and Israeli dominance in the region.” Destroying schools, pharmaceutical plants, factories, and other “things” that allow Iran to function as a nation all serve the decades-old policy of making civilians suffer if their governments challenge US-Israeli dominance.

Unwilling to surrender to the global hegemon and its nuclear-armed outpost in Tel Aviv, Tehran has responded with the limited leverage it has. Defying Trump’s early claims of military victory, Iran continues to strike US assets in the Gulf, fire missiles at Israel, and selectively block the Strait of Hormuz, the transit point for one-fifth of global oil supplies, to widen the economic pain of Trump’s aggression. Earlier today, Iran downed a US fighter jet for the first time, a stark refutation of Trump and Hegseth’s claims that Iranian air defenses are neutralized. Despite talk of an invasion, the current US force posture does not appear sufficient for a ground war. If Trump indeed has no military solution to reopen the Strait, then it appears that he will settle for destroying as much of Iranian society as he can before the political clock runs out on his war of choice.

While Trump also claimed that “regime change was not our goal,” the opposite is the case. As the New York Times reports, the Israeli Mossad went into the war with plans “to galvanize the Iranian opposition — igniting riots and other acts of rebellion that could even lead to the collapse of Iran’s government.” Instead, hundreds of thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets to defend their country’s sovereignty. As Air Force Gen. Alexus Gregory Grynkewich, the head of the US European Command, recently noted before Congress: “What I’ve observed over the course of studying air power in history is that any time you attack a civilian population, you usually end up finding that it just hardens their resolve.”

Unfortunately for Iran’s civilian population, a mirror dynamic is at work. When a foreign country resists their aggression, the US and Israel are resolved to achieve state collapse for as long as it takes. In Syria, a far smaller and weaker country than Iran, it took 13 years of CIA-backed insurgency; crippling sanctions; and a plundering US military occupation to overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s government. In Iran, the US and Israel are hoping to expedite the process with airstrikes that leave Iran’s economy and institutions in ruins, laying the foundation for social unrest or even a civil war that ultimately ends in regime change.

While Iran’s infrastructure is pulverized, working people in the US and around the world are left to absorb the growing costs of Trump’s wrecking ball. On top of the deprivation from destroyed infrastructure and higher food and energy costs worldwide, Trump is equally indifferent to his own population. Hours before his Iran speech, Trump informed a White House luncheon that it’s “not possible” for the US government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and child care programs: “We can’t take care of day care. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars.” In fact, he’s destroying another society that stands in the way of US-Israeli dominance, just as in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Yemen, and Lebanon.

Two days before Trump’s day care complaint, Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a revealing gripe of his own. “Imagine an Iran that, instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars, supporting terrorists or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran,” Rubio said. “You’d have a much different country.”

Imagine if Rubio could apply these professed standards to the administration he serves. Moreover, imagine if Trump could merely live up to his own campaign rhetoric since 2015, in which he repeatedly offered an identical critique of the United States. “We’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people,” he said on the 2016 campaign trail, when we could have used that money “to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems... Imagine if that money had been spent here at home.”

Now presiding over another war of aggression, Trump has just requested a record $1.5 trillion military budget, a roughly 40% increase to be offset by $73 billion in spending cuts on domestic programs. Trump is spending US wealth on immiserating the people of Iran and millions more worldwide, all while shunning the needs of his own citizens. Along with hurting generations of Iranians, he is ushering in a much different, more dangerous world.

In justifying the US-Israeli regime change war on Iran, the Trump administration and Congressional allies have tried to settle on a new excuse: Israel made us do it.

On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted that the US struck Iran in response to the “imminent threat” that it posed to US forces in the region. Yet that threat, he argued, was solely created by Israel. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” Rubio told reporters on Capitol Hill. “...We went proactively in a defensive way to prevent them from inflicting higher damage.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson concurred. “Because Israel was determined to act with or without the U.S., our commander in chief and the administration... had a very difficult decision to make,” Johnson said. Iran “would have immediately retaliated against U.S. personnel and assets,” he argued. Therefore, “the consequences of inaction on our part would have been devastating.”

“Israel faced an existential risk and they were prepared to strike Iran alone,” Sen. Tom Cotton said on Fox News. “If that happened, Iran was very likely to target our troops. That may address the question of ‘why now.’”

Rubio, Johnson, and Cotton are effectively arguing that if Israel is determined to attack another country, the US is obligated to attack that same country before it can retaliate against the US forces that happen to surround it. Taking these claims at face value would lead to the conclusion that the administration has come up with a new definition of “America First”: if Israel chooses to go to war, then America Goes First.

The rationale is so farcical that even President Trump couldn’t bother to go along with it. At the White House today, Trump directly contradicted his top diplomat and Congressional allies. Asked if “Israel forced your hand” to launch strikes on Iran, Trump responded: “No. I might’ve forced their hand. It was my opinion that these lunatics were gonna attack first.”

By lunatics, Trump was not referring to his Israeli partners, but to the government of Iran. Although his explanation is just as ludicrous as Rubio et al’s, I believe that it is nonetheless closer to the truth. The US and Israel have jointly planned to attack Iran for months, as new reporting from the New York Times and Axios underscores. Trump did not bomb Iran because Israel forced him to, or because Iran was poised to attack US forces; he bombed Iran because he decided to become “a full partner” with Israel “in a war to topple the Iranian leadership,” as the Times put it.

This also explains why Trump pretended to engage in diplomacy with Iran, as I discuss in an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano below.

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Operation Epic Fury, the US and Israel’s new regime change war in Iran, began early Saturday with the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and bombings across the country, including at a girls’ elementary school that reportedly killed over 115 people, mostly children. The attacks escalated today with Israeli-US strikes on Tehran that have reportedly killed hundreds more. Iranian reprisals against US military bases in the Gulf region have claimed the lives of at least five US servicemembers. The war quickly widened with Israeli forces killing dozens in Lebanon after Hezbollah, an ally of Iran, fired rockets into northern Israel for the first time since late 2024.

Two weeks before the US and Israel launched their latest act of joint aggression, a follow-up to the 12-day war that they started last June, Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but admitted that the Trump administration had no interest in a diplomatic alternative.

“It’s going to be hard,” Rubio said during a visit to Hungary. “It’s been very difficult for anyone to do real deals with Iran because we’re dealing with radical Shia clerics who are making theological decisions, not geopolitical ones.”

President Trump’s own record with Iran shows his top diplomat’s claim to be false. The US reached a deal with Iran in 2015 that constrained its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. After Trump took office, multiple US government bodies, including the State Department that Rubio now heads, certified that Iran “continued to adhere” to its commitments until Trump withdrew from the pact in 2018.

In his dismissive portrayal of a “radical” clerical government in Tehran unable to make agreements, Rubio was also projecting. Just days later, Trump’s Israel Ambassador Mike Huckabee declared that when it comes to stealing Middle Eastern territory, including that of Gulf allies, Israel is biblically entitled to “take it all.” Huckabee’s comments illustrated that the Trump administration contains radical, theological elements in lockstep with an even more openly extremist Israeli government.

The Trump administration brought that Israel First zealotry to ensuing negotiations with Iranian officials brokered by Oman in Geneva. While listing off different demands in public, including that Iran curb its ballistic missile program and support to regional allies, US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner privately “agreed to focus the talks just on the nuclear program,” as the New York Times reported. After the session concluded on Thursday, and an announcement that follow-up talks on two different tracks would continue this week, an Iranian official present in Geneva shared a qualified assessment that a deal was on the horizon.

“It’s been very positive and the parties have reached some elements of a possible agreement,” the Iranian official told me. “An agreement seems within reach.” Cognizant of the last time the two sides met in June, when Trump abandoned fruitful talks to join an Israeli bombing of Iran, the official added a caveat. “If it’s not sabotaged again, of course... Our previous experience says that Witkoff’s positive attitude could not be trusted that much. In previous negotiations, he seemed fully convinced at the table, but the mood changed completely after he went back to DC. But let’s hope for the best.”

As the Iranian official feared, the Trump team had yet again pretended to engage in good faith diplomacy while paving the way for regime change. In Geneva, they had agreed to focus on the nuclear file all while plotting a war alongside Israel to overthrow Iran’s government and wipe out its missile deterrent to their aggression.

To justify the ruse, the White House put forward a series of false and contradictory statements. Hours before the attack on Friday, Trump repeated his assertion that Iran won’t “say the keywords: ‘We are not going to have a nuclear weapon.’ They just can’t quite get there. They want to enrich a little.” In fact, Iran had repeatedly renounced the pursuit of nuclear weapons, including last week and in the 2015 nuclear deal that Trump sabotaged. As the JCPOA’s opening paragraph states: “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.”

Trump’s casual assertion that Iran wanted to “enrich a little” revealed that he was blurring the pursuit of a nuclear weapon, which requires 90% enrichment, with the token amount that Iran had in fact agreed to. After all, Witkoff had previously agreed to “a little” as well, publicly accepting the JCPOA’s 3.67% cap before backtracking under neoconservative pressure last year.

Sensing that another US reversal was at hand, Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi took the extraordinary step of flying to Washington to make a public appeal. In an interview with CBS News, Albusaidi confirmed that Iran had agreed to a low level of enrichment for medical purposes, as allowed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would then be moved outside the country, as it was to Russia under the JCPOA. Going far beyond the JCPOA, which contained a sunset clause, Albusaidi also confirmed that Iran had agreed to “never, ever” have enough “nuclear material that will create a bomb,” by pledging “zero accumulation, zero stockpiling, and full verification” by international inspectors.

US officials gave a different account to the Wall Street Journal, claiming that Iran insisted on being able “to enrich uranium as much as 20%—far in excess” of the JCPOA. But according to Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute and an informal advisor to the Obama team during their nuclear talks with Iran, this omits critical context. “The 20% comes from the fact that one of the two reactors identified that constitute the need for enrichment is the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR), which requires 19.75% enriched uranium for the production of its fuel pads,” Parsi told me. “But the Iranians would not stockpile any Low Enriched Uranium,” and instead “immediately turn it into fuel pads. Perhaps most importantly, the TRR already has fuel for another 5-7 years. Hence there would be no enrichment at all for the duration of Trump’s presidency.”

To buttress their complaints about a supposedly obdurate Iran, the Journal’s administration sources also claimed that the US “had intelligence that Iran considered attacking American targets before Trump authorized strikes... adding a sense of urgency to the president’s decision.” Yet the administration’s only urgency in this context was to feed the public a justification for its decision to bomb Iran and assassinate its leader. Pentagon briefers acknowledged to lawmakers that there was no intelligence of an imminent Iranian threat to US forces, according to Sen. Mark Warner and other Congressional sources.

Other rationales in the march to war can be just as easily dismissed.

In an interview before the Geneva talks, chief US negotiator Steve Witkoff asserted that Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial grade bomb-making material.” Yet days later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted that the Iranians are “not enriching right now,” but only “trying to get to the point where they ultimately can.” More accurately, Robert Einhorn, a former senior State Department official for nonproliferation, observed that: “There’s a general conclusion today that there’s a de facto suspension of enrichment. There’s no enrichment taking place.”

In his State of the Union address, Trump declared that Iran is “working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.” Rubio echoed this assertion the next day, though with a qualifier-laden statement that amounted to innuendo, not an assertion of fact: “clearly they are headed in the pathway to one day being able to develop weapons that could reach the continental U.S.,” Rubio said (emphasis added). Rubio insisted that he “won’t speculate how far away they are,” for good reason: his hedged statement was meant to suggest a threat that does not actually exist.

The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency reported last year that, at best, “Iran has space launch vehicles it could use to develop a militarily-viable ICBM by 2035 should Tehran decide to pursue the capability.” (emphasis added) Moreover, the intelligence consensus is that Iran’s military posture is primarily defensive. As the US annual threat assessment noted one year ago this month, “Iranian investment in its military has been a key plank of its efforts to confront diverse threats and try to deter and defend against an attack by the United States or Israel.”

Iran’s supposed missile threat to the United States is therefore on par with its supposed nuclear weapons program: non-existent. Yet because Iran does have ballistic missiles that can “deter and defend against an attack,” and a foreign policy that resists Israel’s denial of Palestinian self-determination and domination of the Middle East, it is deemed to be a threat to the US ally in Tel Aviv. It is for this reason that Netanyahu, on Sunday, gushed that Trump has allowed “us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” Netanyahu also yearned, and lobbied for, the US to invade Iraq 23 years ago this month. In joining the Israeli leader for yet another regime change war in West Asia, Trump has made the most radical geopolitical decision by a US president in the two decades since. With no endgame in sight, it is also the most catastrophic.

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To shore up his threats to attack Iran, President Trump has overseen the largest US military build-up in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. One-third of the US Navy’s deployed fleet, including two aircraft carriers holding dozens of planes, is now concentrated around the Persian Gulf in preparation for a potential strike. That is not enough to sustain a long-term war, but enough to inflict serious damage to Iran’s infrastructure and leadership.

In comments today, Trump claimed that there have been “good talks with Iran” and that a deal is possible within a 10-day timeframe. But given his conduct in Venezuela, where a similar build-up led to a deadly bombing and kidnapping operation, some form of US military action is likely.

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Statement from Valéria Chomsky

As many are aware, my husband, Noam Chomsky, now 97, is confronting significant health challenges after suffering a devastating stroke in June 2023. Currently, Noam is under 24/7 medical care and is completely unable to speak or engage in public discourse.

Since this health crisis, I have been entirely absorbed in Noam’s treatment and recovery, solely responsible for him and his medical treatment. Noam and I don’t have any kind of public relations assistance. For this reason, only now have I been able to address the matter of our contacts with Jeffrey Epstein.

Noam and I have felt a profound weight regarding the unresolved questions surrounding our past interactions with Epstein. We do not wish to leave this chapter shrouded in ambiguity.

Throughout his life, Noam has insisted that intellectuals have a responsibility to speak the truth and expose lies — especially when those truths are uncomfortable to themselves.

As is widely known, one of Noam’s characteristics is to believe in the good faith of people. Noam’s overly trust[ing] nature, in this specific case, led to severe poor judgment on both our parts.

Questions have rightly been raised about Noam’s meetings with Epstein, and about administrative assistance his office provided regarding a private financial matter—one that had absolutely no relation to any of Epstein’s criminal conduct.

Noam and I were introduced to Epstein at the same time, during one of Noam’s professional events in 2015, when Epstein’s 2008 conviction in the State of Florida was known by very few people, while most of the public – including Noam and I – was unaware of it. That only changed after the November 2018 report by Miami Herald.

When we were introduced to Epstein, he presented himself as a philanthropist of science and a financial expert. By presenting himself this way, Epstein gained Noam’s attention, and they began corresponding. Unknowingly, we opened a door to a Trojan horse.

Epstein began to encircle Noam, sending gifts and creating opportunities for interesting discussions in areas Noam has been working on extensively. We regret that we did not perceive this as a strategy to ensnare us and to try to undermine the causes Noam stands for.

We had lunch, at Epstein’s ranch, once, in connection with a professional event; we attended dinners at his townhouse in Manhattan and stayed a few times in an apartment he offered when we visited New York City. We also visited Epstein’s Paris apartment one afternoon for the occasion of a work trip. In all cases, these visits were related to Noam’s professional commitments. We never went to his island or knew about anything that happened there.

We attended social meetings, lunches, and dinners where Epstein was present and academic matters were discussed. We never witnessed any inappropriate, criminal, or reproachable behavior from Epstein or others. At no time did we see children or underage individuals present.

Epstein proposed meetings between Noam and figures that Noam had interest in, due to their different perspectives on themes related to Noam’s work and thought. It was in this academic context that Noam wrote a letter of recommendation.

Noam’s email to Epstein, in which Epstein sought advice about the press, should be read in context. Epstein had claimed to Noam that he [Epstein] was being unfairly persecuted, and Noam spoke from his own experience in political controversies with the media. Epstein created a manipulative narrative about his case, which Noam, in good faith, believed in. It is now clear that it was all orchestrated, having as, at least, one of Epstein’s intentions to try to have someone like Noam repairing Epstein’s reputation by association.

Noam’s criticism was never directed at the women’s movement; on the contrary, he has always supported gender equity and women’s rights. What happened was that Epstein took advantage of Noam’s public criticism towards what came to be known as “cancel culture” to present himself as a victim of it.

Only after Epstein’s second arrest in [July] 2019 did we learn the full extent and gravity of what were then accusations—and are now confirmed—heinous crimes against women and children. We were careless in not thoroughly researching his background. This was a grave mistake, and for that lapse in judgment, I apologize on behalf of both of us. Noam shared with me, before his stroke, that he felt the same way.

In 2023, Noam’s initial public response to inquiries about Epstein failed to adequately acknowledge the gravity of Epstein’s crimes and the enduring pain of his victims, primarily because Noam took it as obvious that he condemned such crimes. However, a firm and explicit stance on such matters is always required.

It was deeply disturbing for both of us to realize we had engaged with someone who presented as a helpful friend but led a hidden life of criminal, inhumane, and perverted acts.

Since the revelation of the extent of his crimes, we have been shocked.

In order to clarify the check: Epstein asked Noam to develop a linguistic challenge that Epstein wished to establish as a regular prize. Noam worked on it, and Epstein sent a check for US$20,000 as payment. Epstein’s office contacted me to arrange for the check to be sent to our home address.

Regarding the reported transfer of approximately $270,000, I must clarify that these were entirely Noam’s own funds. At the time, Noam had identified inconsistencies in his retirement resources that threatened his economic independence and caused him great distress. Epstein offered technical assistance to resolve this specific situation.

On this matter, Epstein acted accordingly, recovering the funds for Noam, in a display of help and very likely as part of a machination to gain greater access to Noam. Epstein acted solely as a financial advisor for this specific matter. To the best of my knowledge, Epstein never had access to our bank or investment accounts.

It is also important to clarify that Noam and I never had any investments with Epstein or his office—individually or as a couple.

I hope this retrospectively clarifies and explains Noam Chomsky’s interactions with Epstein. Noam and I recognize the gravity of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and the profound suffering of his victims. Nothing in this statement is intended to minimize that suffering, and we express our unrestricted solidarity with the victims.

February 7, 2026.

Valéria Chomsky

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As if the lingering prospect of a new attack on Iran is not dangerous enough, the Trump administration is toying with a greater threat to global security.

With Thursday’s expiration of the New START treaty, the US and Russia no longer have any legal constraints on their arsenals of nuclear weapons. President Trump let the treaty collapse rather than accept a Kremlin offer to extend for one year, the maximum possible. This removes the last formal constraint on a renewed arms race between two states that already can destroy the world many times over.

There are unconfirmed reports that the two sides have reached an informal understanding to observe the treaty’s terms for at least six months. And, in a rare sign of progress, Moscow and Washington have announced a resumption of high-level military-to-military dialogue. The Biden administration suspended those contacts in late 2021 as Russia built up its forces on Ukraine’s borders.

Yet the news is far from reassuring.

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